The Organisation Where Everyone Was Busy and Nothing Was Moving
The CEO who contacted me didn't think she had a technology problem. She thought she might have a people problem — or possibly a culture problem.
The situation
Her senior team were working long hours. Meetings were full. Inboxes were overflowing. And yet the organisation felt stuck. Important work moved slowly. Decisions that should have been straightforward took weeks. Nobody could quite explain why.
We started by looking at internal email.
A people problem
A workflow problem — with email at the centre of it
internal emails sent per person, on average, over three months
Not total emails — internal ones. Not including replies or forwards. Just emails written and sent to colleagues.
spent per person over three months just writing internal email
consumed every working day before a single reply was read
the sending cost, on the receiving end, since most emails went to several people
What email had quietly become
Email is a communication tool. It was designed for sending messages between people. The problem is that most organisations have pressed it into service as something else entirely.
A task management system — "can you look into this?" disappearing into an inbox with no clear owner
A decision log — context buried in a thread, invisible to anyone not copied at the right moment
A document store — one attachment becomes two versions in two inboxes, then three after the first reply
An institutional memory — when a colleague leaves, their archive goes with them, and so does everything only documented there
None of this is anybody's fault. It's what happens when a tool designed for one purpose gets pressed into service for everything, because it's familiar and it's always been there.
The fix wasn't a new system. Everything they needed was already included in their Microsoft 365 subscription, largely unused.
Tasks into Planner
Work was assigned, tracked, and visible. Everyone could see what was in progress, waiting, or overdue — without a single chasing email.
Discussions into Teams
Conversations happened in shared spaces with full context. New starters could read back through a channel and understand how a decision was reached.
Documents into SharePoint
One version, in one place, with a full history of changes. No more "can you send me the latest version?"
None of this required a training programme or a change management consultancy. It required a clear decision about which tool was for which purpose, communicated simply, and followed consistently.
Within a few weeks the difference was visible. Senior leaders were spending less time in their inboxes and more time on the work that actually needed their attention. The sense of being busy without making progress — that particular, demoralising feeling — started to lift.
The lesson
The CEO's instinct that something was wrong had been right. She'd just been looking in the wrong place for the cause. The people were fine. The process was the problem. Email has its place. As a workflow tool, it is one of the most expensive habits an organisation can have — not because of what it costs to run, but because of what it costs in time, clarity, and momentum every single day.
Does this sound familiar?
If any of this resonates — the wrong versions, the chasing, the tools nobody quite trusts — it's worth a conversation. Most of the problems we fix are more straightforward than they feel from the inside.
No obligation. No hard sell. If it's not the right fit, I'll tell you.
